George Rush: Assisted Living
October 2 - December 21, 2026
Assisted Living is an immersive installation of 204 framed gouache paintings on paper. Though at first glance the installation appears to be a meditation on the act of and, indeed, the nature of painting, it is in fact based on and indelibly linked to George Rush’s daily practice of using the lens of his iPhone to capture and, importantly, to index images from his day-to-day life, primarily during the COIVID pandemic. The use of a camera profoundly altered Rush’s practice as a painter. Especially a camera as easy, available, and democratic as the ubiquitous smart phone camera.
Though some of the paintings in Assisted Living date back to 2017, the project started to take more definitive form in 2019 as Rush began to expand his thoughts on the changing nature of how we look at and assess the world through a now ever-present camera. He found that it also became a way of thinking about the changing currency of the photograph as the ever-growing tsunami of images grows and accumulates around us.
While this array of moments might potentially lend themselves to cacophony, they instead began to evenly and calmly illustrate the lay of our current landscape. In essence Rush, a deeply academically trained painter, began to see the photographic image as an indexing tool by which to consider a span that begins before COVID-19, deepens during the height of the pandemic, and tapers off with the slow acclimation to our “new normal.”
Photographs of highways, strip malls, parking lots, and suburban Ohio neighborhoods started to fill Rush’s studio alongside more intimate pictures of family, friends, and scenes from his teaching job at Ohio State University. As this index of photographs grew, two additional categories of photographs developed: bookshelves (the library in Rush’s therapist’s waiting room inspired an ongoing series that uses the language of marketing self-care as found poetry), and contrails (daily dog walks became an opportunity to observe and record the trails from planes passing over the fly-over state in which Rush found himself contained during lockdown.)
As Rush began to translate these photographic images, he found the lens through which they had been captured changed his approach to painting. The resulting visual effects lie somewhere between Andy Warhol’s Paint by Numbers pieces, the formal quotidian rhythms of Fairfield Porter’s paintings and the decisive moment photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. The mood of these paintings also reveals something akin to Freud’s ideas regarding the uncanny (unheimlich) which ponders the idea that our understanding of our place in the world is not driven or altered by something completely foreign or new, but rather by familiar, long-established aspects of the mind that have been repressed and then resurfaced .
George Rush grew up in Brooklyn, New York and Newton, Massachusetts. He earned a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. After graduating from Columbia, he was studio assistant to Peter Halley. He has exhibited widely and has been included in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Columbus Museum of Art, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Ross Art Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University, and Center gallery at Fordham University. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, Copenhagen, Madrid, Miami, Mexico City, Galveston, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Detroit. In 2010 he joined the faculty at Ohio State University and is an Associate Professor of Art. He is a recipient of awards from New York Foundation of the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He lives in Columbus, Ohio.
